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Play The Most Influential Amiga Games Now

It wasn’t till 1987 that I experienced my first (and worst) case of
technolust
ever. The object that inspired such raw feelings of lust, of course, was
the Commodore
Amiga.

As a lowly Commodore
128
owner, which was really just a glorified Commodore
64
in a beige case, I bought every issue of the Commodore magazines of the
day.

These
magazines started showing off these lush advertisements of the Commodore
Amiga, boasting of its 4096 colors and 4-channel stereo sound.

I had to have it.

Looking back, I am shocked at how much my lust for the Amiga held sway
over me. I purchased a copy of every Amiga magazine on the newstand,
talked about it incessantly to anyone who would listen, and had vivid
dreams of the Amiga’s amazing graphics capabilities.

And when I finally got my hands on it, it was every bit as good as I had
hoped.

For many Amiga users at the time, the Amiga was true to its name
(spanish for female friend) in that it was the closest thing to a
girlfriend we had. Give me a break, I was only twelve at the time.

Like having a girlfriend, I spent countless hours with the computer, not
to mention countless dollars on peripherals and upgrades. I remember
hustling for tips at the local
commissary
in order to upgrade the beast from 512K to 1MB of ram (cost: \$99).

I only had the pleasure to play two of the games listed, Defender of
the
Crown,
in which catapulting castles was pure fun, and SpeedBall
2,
which probably was responsible for the pile of broken joysticks I
accumulated.

Personally though, I thought Lords of the Rising
Sun
(also made by Cinemaware) was even better than Defender of the Crown.

The game sequence in which you could snipe advancing siegers using a
first-person bow and arrow with a little red laser point dot was
exhilarating (sadly, I could not find a screenshot).

I also liked Speedball 1 (shown here) slightly better than 2 because the
side scrolling in 2 always threw me off.

I still have my Amiga 500 gathering dust in a storage cabinet in the
garage. I’ve been meaning to unpack it and see if it still works, but my
home is small and there’s really no room to set it up. I figure there
must be a better way to try out my old games.

Amiga Emulation!

Digging around, I discovered there’s an active project to create an
Amiga emulator for *nix called
UAE. There’s a Windows
port called, not surprisingly,
WinUAE (click
for full size).

Unfortunately, these projects cannot distribute the Amiga ROM nor its
operating system due to copyright issues. However they do provide
instructions on how to transfer the ROM and operating system over to
your PC on their
FAQ.

Amiga Forever

An even easier approach is to simply purchase Amiga
Forever for around forty
bucks. This is an ISO image that contains a preconfigured WinUAE with
the original ROM and operating system files. Amiga Forever is sold by
Cloanto who currently own certain
intellectual property rights to the Amiga.

Amiga Forever comes with several games for the Amiga as well that vary
with the edition purchased. The site also has a games
section in
which they list places to download more games.

For example, the Cinemaware site has disk images for pretty much all of
their games available for free, including Lords of the Rising
Sun.

Play Defender of the Crown Immediately

All this talk of Amiga emulation sounds like fun and everything, but
seriously, do I need yet another time sink? If you’re jonesing for some
Amiga gaming now and don’t want to be bothered with emulation, head over
to the Cinemaware website and satiate your Amiga gaming kick by playing
the Flash version of Defender of the
Crown.
Now about that time sink...

Though I owned a couple
computers
prior to the Amiga, the Amiga is truly the computer that fueled my fire
for computing.